Jill DuffyFatpaintThe free and Web-based app Fatpaint is Photoshop Express-meets-Caf&eacute; Press, with a retail side where you can design your own personal or business products. It's not a professional-grade replacement for Photoshop, but it can solve image editing problems fast&#151;no download or registration required.

Free. Comprehensive features for creating and editing images. Nothing to download. No registration required. Entirely Web-based. Can save images as .PNG and .JPG files.

Cons

Hard to find some of the most basic functions and tools. Browser crashes can result in lost work. Can't rearrange menus.

Bottom Line

The free and Web-based app Fatpaint is Photoshop Express-meets-Café Press, with a retail side where you can design your own personal or business products. It's not a professional-grade replacement for Photoshop, but it can solve image editing problems fastno download or registration required.

If you've ever been stuck having to fix a graphic immediately but didn't have a full suite of tools in front of you (it's happened to me), or if you need to manipulate images only on the rarest occasions, Fatpaint (free) can get you in and out of a pickle for free, no download or registration required. Fatpaint is a free, completely online graphic design program, image editor, and online shop for custom-printed products, such as t-shirts, iPhone cases, business cards, and flyers. Fatpaint is a little like Photoshop Express-meets-Café Press, with vector drawing thrown in. In many ways, Fatpaint is on par with LunaPic (free, 3 stars), another Web-based photo editing tool. Photoshop Elements ($90, street, 4 stars) is heftier than both of those apps, but if you need a basic image editing tool today, for free, that you can use immediately, Fatpaint is what you're looking for.

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Owned by small start-up company Mersica, Fatpaint has an impressive feature set for such a young product. It had its beta debut in April 2010 and has been open for all since April 2011. In testing, it also ran surprisingly fast and smoothly in Firefox on my ThinkPad running Windows XP (with a speedy Internet connection), even though the system requirements suggested it would be even faster on Windows 7. Apple and Linux users can play with Fatpaint tooread on for more about system requirements.

The Learning Curve
In terms of features, Fatpaint bites off a lot more than many other free image editors could chew. You can flip and spin images in 3D rotations, bend and skew them, and work a whole lot of magic with cloning tools and the like. Tool icons in Fatpaint largely mirror what's used in Photoshop and the free alternative GIMP (free, 4 stars). Paint buckets, lassos, and magic wands will be familiar to anyone who's used those other programs.

Online tutorial videos (complete with gloomy and perplexing piano background music) and a user's manual for the editor had me pulling and prodding at images within minutes of launching the app. The videos are especially helpful at learning how to perform many of the amazing tricks that Fatpaint has up its sleeve, yet I still had a hard time figuring out the single most frequently performed action that I use in image editing: cropping. Cropping is possible; it's just not intuitive. Be prepared to learn the fun stuff in the videos, but not necessarily the actions you need.

The learning curve isn't too steep if you're planning to use Fatpaint for only a handful of actions, as I imagine many users will. Learn what it is you'll be doing, whether overlaying text on an image to create a playbill for your kid's recital, or slapping pictures of your Chinese Crested on sweaters to give as holiday gifts. However, if you plan to spend a considerable amount of time digitally painting original images or retouching photos, then you'll need to set aside a day or two to learn the ins and outs.

Recommended System Requirements
To run Fatpaint, Mersica recommends you use one of these browsers: Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or Internet Explorer. Cookies and Javascript must be enabled. Aside from the browser preferences (which includes all the major players except Safari), Fatpaint works best on a computer running Windows 7 with at least 2GB RAM and 1GB video memory, as well as a decent graphics card. It'll still work on older systems as long you have enough graphics memory. Apple and Linux users can get their hands on Fatpaint, too, but they're safest using it in Firefox.
Because it's Web-based, there is the potential that you will lose all your work if your browser crashes. In normal use, though, Fatpaint does a nice job of remembering what you were working on last: Anytime you restart the app, it asks if you'd like to open the most recently edited project again.

What Makes Fatpaint Fat?
Fatpaint is fat with tools, and it gets even fatter when you count up the additional features and services. When it comes to opening image files, you can select not only from your computer, but also directly from Flickr (free to $24.95 per year, 4 stars), Picasa (free, 4.5 stars)and not just your images in your Flickr/Picasa account, but any valid ones that turn up in a search! Searched images from Yahoo!, Google, Bing, Wikimedia Commons, and the Fatpaint image collection are included, too. I really enjoyed the ability to select the license type when searching for Flickr images. That's impressive, and it removes several steps and dozens of mouse clicks for anyone who normally searches Flickr separately, selects the appropriate Creative Commons license restrictions, finds an image, downloads or copies it, launches their image editor, and opens the file. Similarly, looking for images with Fatpaint via the search engines brings up more helpful filters: image size, aspect, and so on.

The marketplace side of Fatpaintthe side that is similar to Café Presslets users design graphics to be placed on personal and business goods for sale, from business cards to coasters. As with the search abilities, having such a rice image editor in the same location as the retail point can quickly save users a lot of time from moving between programs.

Graphics for All
While Fatpaint is certainly not a replacement for the business-grade Photoshop ($495, street, 5 stars) (or even Photoshop Elements), I do think there is a place for Fatpaint in the world of graphic arts. For people who do a limited amount of image creation, or for coming up with quick solution to a graphics problem in a pinch, Fatpaint is fast. There are no barriers to using the product (no registration, no download, no payment), other than the learning curve and making sure you're running one of the recommended browsers. If you're going to be working with images often, though, you probably do want a desktop program. Photoshop is what you need if you're in a professional environment, while GIMP is not bad if you need something in the free category.

Fatpaint

Bottom Line: The free and Web-based app Fatpaint is Photoshop Express-meets-Caf&eacute; Press, with a retail side where you can design your own personal or business products. It's not a professional-grade replacement for Photoshop, but it can solve image editing problems fast&#151;no download or registration required.

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About the Author

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps, as well as health and fitness technology. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on keeping your digital life tidy and tidying up your real life using technology. She is the author of the book Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life and writes abou... See Full Bio

Fatpaint

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